Obama's Foreign Policy has moved us toward reason

Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. |
3/23/2016, 2:49 p.m.

As Barack Obama's presidency counts down its last months, amid the raucous babble of the Republican presidential debate, people are beginning to realize how much we will miss Obama's leadership. He has served with dignity and grace, increasingly rare attributes in American politics. His family has exhibited the values that Americans embrace. He has brought the economy back from the freefall he inherited.

Republicans, of course, scorn all things Obama, with particular emphasis on his

our military and fostered the spread of terror. The din covers the emptiness of

the argument.

In reality, Obama's foreign policy will be remembered as making a start toward reason. His record, of course, is complex. The president has enjoyed some remarkable successes- taking out Osama bin Laden, traducing al-Qaida, the nuclear deal with Iran, normalization of relations with Cuba (and thus with other neighbors across the hemisphere). He's also met with frustrations as well. He was unable to extract us from Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria and Libya. He failed to close Guantanamo. He's also asserted, dangerously, unprecedented executive prerogatives in the use of drones, assassination, the hunting of whistle-blowers, mass surveillance and more. But Obama's biggest legacy is his effort to turn America away from the interventionist appetites of both the neo-conservatives and the "indispensable nation" liberal activists. In a remarkable set of interviews with Jeffry Goldberg in the Atlantic, Obama argues that while the United States must lead, it cannot police the world. We must be both "hardheaded" and "big hearted." We have to be clear about our real security concerns, learn to pick our spots, and not allow ourselves to be dragged into every civil war or humanitarian crisis.

The president is clear - and clearly right - on the priority of threats facing the

U.S. Despite the popular terrors about terror, he understands that the Islamic State

is not an existential threat to the U.S. In contrast, climate change potentially

threatens the world if we don't act to counter it.

Similarly, the president argues that the Middle East is no longer terribly important

to U.S. interests, particularly with our increasing energy independence. The U.S.-China relationship, in contrast, is the "most critical." Sustaining a peaceful rise of

China that will make it a partner in securing international order is far more

Important to our security than all of the civil wars in the Middle East.

Obama believes, against the clamor of an interventionist foreign policy establishment, that overextension in the Middle East is far more destructive than restraint in the region. As his adviser Ben Rhodes summarizes, the president's view is that "overextension” in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest."

According to Goldberg, Obama also has a common sense position about Putin. He sees Russia as weak, but understands that it has direct security concerns about Ukraine and Georgia on its border. That fact is, as Obama says, the U.S. is not going to war over Ukraine. Russia is prepared to do that. "People respond to what their